Did you know you can easily use Ravelry to keep track of all the information about your projects? Whether you’re knitting, crocheting, or even machine knitting, Ravelry’s project pages allow you to make notes about all different aspects of your projects, and this is especially helpful during one of our Berroco knit-alongs! Keeping a project page for your knit-along project makes it easy to share photos and let other makers know what you thought about your project. So today’s post is going to outline how to set up your project page (for any project, not just a knit-along project).
If you haven’t already joined Ravelry, you’ll need to do so to take advantage of the project notes page, but every Ravelry account is absolutely free. There are a handful of “perks” you can use if you chip in $5 every year but you can do everything that I’m going to show you here with the free account. Also all of these images are from a desktop computer, but you can use all of these features on a mobile device, the screen will just look a little different.
To begin, once you log into Ravelry, you’ll end up on the home page, which looks like this.
From here, you can do a couple of things to create a new project page.
First Pathway to Project Page Creation
Go to the upper right corner of the page, hover over “my notebook” and then go to “projects”.
Click on “Add Project”
For this example, I’m going to add the Mallow cardigan from our Marsh + Mallow Knit-along.
I click continue, and am taken to a screen where I can make sure I’m adding the correct pattern. Since I want to use the free cardigan knitting pattern Mallow from the Berroco Design Team, I’m going to click on that button. That’s the end of the first pathway to creating a project page.
Second Pathway to Project Page Creation
From the home page, do a search for Mallow in the Quick Search box.
This will take you to a search results page and right now the Mallow we want is the first option. This won’t always be the case, so sometimes you may have to look through the results a bit. But for this example, we can just click on Mallow.
You’ll go to the pattern page for Mallow. A pattern page has all the information about the pattern—the weight of the yarn used, the amount of yarn used, where you can find the pattern, how many other people have made the pattern, and so much more. It also has handy buttons in the upper right corner, including “Cast On Project” which is what we’re going to click now. You can give your project page a special name if you’d like, but I’m just going to go with “Mallow” and hit the “create this project” button.
You’ll land on your newly created project page, but to fill in the details, you’ll need to click “edit project”.
Filling in the Project Page Information
Whichever pathway I took, now I have a blank project page that’s in my notebook! You can fill in all the information you like to keep as detailed notes as much as you like. Typically I like to note the size that I’m making, the yarn I’m using, and the needle size I’m using. If I’m really on top of things I’ll add the gauge, though I’ll be honest—I tend to forget to add that after I’ve swatched or finished the project.
I start filling out the form and when I get to the yarn section, I click “Add yarn.” If you’ve added yarn to you stash before setting up this project page, you can use the “use stash yarn” button, but this tutorial is starting with the very basics needed for knit-alongs, and adding yarn to your stash is not a part of that.
From there, I type in the yarn that I’m going to use.
If I click the little “chain link” button in the right of the text box, it gives me a box from which I can select the yarn I’m using. This step isn’t really necessary but it makes things a little bit easier, and ensures that your project is indexed with the yarn (users can search to see what other users have made with the yarns).
When I click “Linen Stonewash”, the pop-up box disappears but Ravelry magically adds in details such as the weight, the yardage per grams, and creates a new little box to the right that shows you 14 other users have projects with this yarn, and it’s in 15 stashes.
Then I can add in the colorway, and even include the purchase information if I want to include that.
Click “Save changes” at the bottom of the page and you’re done!